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GABA ghoul posted:I'm sure there are ways to explore all kinds of avenues in the WW on some form of basic income. Caleb doesn't want that though because he wants preferred medical treatment for his mother. He wants something more. "Preferred medical treatment" already speaks to the kind of dystopian critique WW is making of modern society, though, yes? It's essentially the plot of Elysium, that there's this Morlock underclass with (de facto) no chance for upward mobility, who routinely die from being too poor because the arch-capitalist system in power characterizes "wanting good health outcomes" as a luxury. Any "basic income" that fails to overturn that status quo hasn't really done anything in the pursuit of social equity. Caleb doesn't want "more," he wants to be treated as equivalently human to a rich person. Of course, the concept of wealth or success as a zero-sum-game says a lot about your thinking: that in essence, there's no version of a human society that isn't defined by market capitalism. Someone has to be the winner and someone (likely many more someones) have to be the loser. And I think this season of WW is specifically interested in challenging that, in a Marxist sense. Hence why the conflict is pivoting from Dolores' human vs. robot race war of S2 to a coalition of disenfranchised robots AND humans vs. the systems of control and oppression built by the rich. A Buttery Pastry posted:Given that the SAT score is essentially laundering racial oppression as meritocracy, yeah. Yes. 100%.
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Apr 1, 2020 23:36
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A Buttery Pastry posted:The difference is that capitalism demands resources be concentrated in a small group, exacerbating resource scarcity. Also, given the technology presented in the show, a lot of doctor work could be replaced by AIs and robots, which would largely get around the problem of some doctors being better than others. In all kinds of ways, the society in WW seems to be post-scarcity. Advanced AI is apparently common enough outside the park, you have one doing phone therapy, so sure: AI medicine that's accessible to everyone doesn't seem out of hand, at all. To say nothing of food production or manufacturing, which seem like automated processes done with 3D printers in a lab. Resources don't seem scarce at all, but access to them sure is. It's that part that makes the whole tech-bro "Gods and clods" type of argument about wealth so frustrating. Technology in the show has advanced to the point most people don't have jobs even if they wanted them, but the wealthy are still thinking like an Ayn Rand novel: I control this [industrial thing], thus I'm entitled to all it produces, and if the masses wanted the same, they'd simply do what I did. But that is systemically impossible, even if someone had the will or the talent. The strata of extreme privilege has become so narrow, and the barrier for entry so high, no one can actually get there without being born there. Of course it looks like determinism: there are no options left except literally crime, and even then not really.
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Apr 2, 2020 19:43
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A Buttery Pastry posted:Also, "as good as a human" implies that intelligence and such is just a linear scale, when an AI doctor could be a far more specialized creation that's not really primed towards consciousness and personality like the hosts. Yeah, the hosts are purpose-built to experience humanlike cognition, but AI could be all kinds of things. "Cognitive computing" systems are already used for medical applications today (IBM Watson has been used for research and diagnosis for years), and the goal there isn't to emulate a doctor so much as perform complex or novel analysis of medical data to suggest treatments. Sci-fi tends to imagine advanced AI as a wholesale reproduction of human consciousness, but that would be a very specific goal for a programmer. It'd involve building a system with a sense of self, with embodied sensations or perceptions, with emotional states. Realistically, an "advanced" AI might just be advanced at spatial analysis, or natural language processing. It might have superhuman capacities for database research, but also have none of the subjective capacities you'd need to feel "suffering" or "exploitation" in the way a human being would. To your point, human intelligence isn't a scalar quantity to be met or exceeded, it's a really complicated intersection of tons of kinds of "intelligence." The language of revolutionary politics happens to make sense in WW, but mostly because the hosts were built to feel and think like a person. A self-driving car might also be an advanced AI - it "sees" things and has complex behaviors - but is your Tesla being "oppressed" when you drive in it?
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Apr 4, 2020 10:17
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Cojawfee posted:She probably intended to start out killing all humans, Bender style, but then realized that most humans live almost as lovely a life as she did. Yeah, her attitude was Kill All Humans in S2, for sure. But her only context for humans was the rich people who raped and murdered her for decades, so of course she felt that way. Caleb’s entire purpose in the show is to reframe Dolores’ thinking. He’s a human who’s been similarly disempowered by the same assholes, and her revolution can either accommodate that or become something unjustifiable.
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Apr 8, 2020 02:23
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rich thick and creamy posted:I think it was in this thread that I offered up a prediction when Season 1 was wrapping up that our scrappy band of hosts would escape the park only to find out humanity died out a long time ago. I never thought this specific thing, but I do (still) suspect that the show will end on a similar note to Spielberg's A.I., where humanity dies out on its own, but the intellectual and cultural legacy of humanity is preserved in these humanoid robots first built as slaves and distractions for wealthy assholes. Multiple characters had/have the explicit goal of duplicating a real human consciousness, and there's all the Marxist subtext to S3 where the robot-slaves have a similar experience to (and common cause with) working class humans living as algorithm-slaves in "the real world." My guess is that these ideas persist, and the point becomes that the robots represent a utopian alternative to the current hell-world run by the wealthy technocracy. In centuries or millennia, all "real" humans will be gone, but a reasonable simulation of them will still be around in something similar to The Valley Beyond. Which could also be anywhere, including underground or on other planets or just floating in space.
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Jun 27, 2022 22:13
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Owling Howl posted:Almost as tedious as when they fight regular people and instead of just killing them they throw them across the room, casually walks over to pick them up to throw them across the room again etc. Yeah, the obvious contrivance of why Caleb or whoever is still fine after fighting a murderbot is pretty ridiculous. I remember Blade Runner 2049 taking the idea of "superhumanly-strong bio-robot" to its logical conclusion, and it was sometimes horrifying to watch. Luv kills a guy by one-punch crushing his upper spine, K body-slams a guy onto his knee and then rapidly kneecaps like 3 others in less than 2 seconds. You'd think WW robots would operate similarly; their strength, speed, or accuracy were only ever on-par with humans (or worse) because of software limitation. Every one of Hale's army should have maxed stats in all areas. Xealot fucked around with this message at 22:48 on Jul 5, 2022 |
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Jul 5, 2022 22:44
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GABA ghoul posted:e: also, where was Dubbs all these decades? He had no dust on him. Was he just living a normal life somewhere off screen? I also have this question. As I recall, he was bleeding out in the motel tub when Bernard went to the Sublime. I assumed Bernard would've repaired him upon waking or something, but he was just...off doing poo poo, I guess. "The Stubbs Webisodes." Make it happen, HBO.
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Jul 12, 2022 23:37
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Gravitas Shortfall posted:Yeah I really liked that callback. Of course Halloris would revive the "let's make perfect host copies of real people" because gently caress it, why not? William makes sense to copy, he's important and powerful. But why expend the effort for Caleb? Am I forgetting something relevant from last season? I thought he was just some everyman, one of dozens or hundreds to join the resistance effort against Hale's plot, but not special to her or the cause in any particular way. Rehoboam labeled him an "outlier," but does that mean anything anymore?
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Jul 19, 2022 22:25
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Mandrel posted:yeah i can't remember if they know stubbs is a host or not. or even if they have a way of identifying them, you'd think they would Maybe I missed it, too, but I can't imagine they know that about Bernard or Stubbs. There's no way they'd trust hosts regardless of what they claimed, at least you'd think. They're already paranoid enough about the two of them, since they're strangers who showed up acting real confident and seem to know more than they should. The Dave posted:Hopefully the lesson they leave us with is it doesn’t matter if you body is synthetic or real, human nature is a curse that needs to end. Intense Battlestar Galactica vibes from this episode, on this point. That Hale/William scene where she philosophizes about being a god and he laments that they're still derivative of humanity brought me back to that very excellent BSG scene where Cavill laments that he wants to "see gamma rays and smell dark matter." The hosts are an advanced AI that could have any form they wanted or even no form at all, but they're still operating within these human parameters, in humanoid forms, interacting with the world through sensations and emotions as a human might perceive them. I hope the Sublime becomes important later as a kind of evolved counterpoint to what Hale is doing, where the Valley Beyond hosts have transcended human concerns and thus don't really care about humanity or embodiment anymore. Hale's petty tyranny, her attempt to control and punish humanity as a form of revenge, is so empty and small as a "master plan." Why bother? She could send hosts to other planets, build self-sufficient colonies lightyears away and transcend her human origins so exponentially that "humanity" was merely a distant speck of memory in her story. But she won't, because she's like an angry teenager.
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Jul 26, 2022 22:45
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Megillah Gorilla posted:Which suggests that her transcended hosts see just how toxic she is and are using Bernard to stop her in the only way they can given that they only exist as simulations now. Very possible. I hosed up and missed a solid 10 minutes of this episode (I paused at the human chair scene, then resumed after my brother started watching on my HBO account and jumped right to Stubbs on a boat.) Now I’ve gone back, and am even more confused about Hale’s agenda. She wants the hosts to transcend, resents that they want to continue reveling in human torture. But she still wants to do it herself. And why do they even have the option? Why was this puppet show of fly-people even a necessary step if Hale considers it vulgar or boring?
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Jul 27, 2022 07:42
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I'm wondering the same thing. I assumed most of the world had been totally decimated. That New York was some small fiefdom Hale maintained as a park for hosts, but that outside it was abandoned wasteland the infected NYC residents couldn't perceive. Maybe there are other cities maintained similarly? But I can't imagine there are still billions of humans in the world and they're all controlled by towers. Were there any towers around the diner Bernard and Stubbs went into?
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Jul 27, 2022 21:44
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DamnGlitch posted:There’s really nothing to suggest she wants coexistence and not only uber/untermench until she can convince all the hosts to ascend. At that point I assume she’ll have any remaining humans dome themselves. I assumed the same. She put together FlyWorld as some kind of robot Rumspringa for hosts to sow some wild oats, with the intention that they'd all ascend some day and she could finally flip the kill switch on humanity.
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Aug 5, 2022 00:11
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Yeah, given that Amazon and Google already understand the importance of offsite data redundancy, you'd think a hyper-intelligent AI in 2080 would have a more robust system for their cloud heaven than the one server farm powered by a singular source. You'd think they'd put together a few dozen networked sites worldwide, all powered by different renewables and/or nuclear. Probably wouldn't hurt to have accessible drone hosts in the physical world to handle repairs or manufacturing new equipment and what-not.
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Aug 10, 2022 22:35
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superjew posted:I'm hoping Bernard knew that this episode's victims (and other dead hosts) will be brought back somehow, and that his message was for his new self and not for Christina. I don't see how they can sell a fifth season without Bernard and Maeve (unless it becomes the Stubbs show and also bring back Elsie somehow please) I'm also hoping that the fidelity-passing MIB from the end of season 2 is a new William that's made to take out DIB. I also cant imagine this show killing off all the significant Black characters in one fell swoop, never bringing them back, and focusing instead on the suddenly-all-white cast of Ed Harris, ERW, James Marsden, Aaron Paul, and *checks notes* Luke Hemsworth. I guess Frankie got shot but isn't dead. But no way are Jeffrey Wright, Thandiwe Newton, and Tessa Thompson all staying dead.
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Aug 12, 2022 20:53
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LividLiquid posted:The Walking Dead - Glenn's death. Seems I was far from alone there as the ratings evidently took an absolute nose-dive right at that moment. They never returned and neither did I. I quit both for the same reasons, around the same times. Walking Dead was always grim, edgy bullshit, but it was kind of novel in that aspect at one time. By this point in the run, though, it was clear they had no other agenda than to shock and punish viewers. It wasn't just the fact Glenn died or the brutality of how it happened, but the arbitrariness of the decision and how much they milked the anticipation across a season break. "Who's gonna die?!? Tune in to find out!" is such empty cynicism, I just couldn't engage anymore. Handmaid's Tale was more a victim of the context, but I remember quitting in early season 2 when June hides out in the abandoned offices of a newspaper that was massacred. Real life was and is dark enough already with respect to an army of American Taliban seeking to dominate and massacre anyone opposed to Christian fascism. I didn't need to wallow in the misery of this piece of fiction when real life was already exactly like that.
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Aug 19, 2022 02:36
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Farmer Crack-rear end posted:Wait, what happened here? I may be mistaken, but I believe they're referring to how Paul Campbell (who played Billy Keikeya) refused to sign a longer-term contract and was so written off the show. It's likely he would've been one of the Final Five instead of Tori, offering more dramatic potential since Billy was so close to Roslin from the outset and would've been a more shocking reveal.
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Jan 14, 2023 00:42
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